Literature for Children and Young Adults

New Titles: Cross-over

Diletta Hints

was born in 1995 in Bologna. Her mother is Italian and her father comes from US. Now she lives in Bologna with her parents, her brother. She’s currently attending her firs year at University, Human and Arts Studies (always along with her passion for music).

This is her first novel. Diletta wrote this novel when she was fifteen and she didn’t show it to anyone for over one year. Until when she timidly decided to knock at my door…

Now she is working at the sequel!

BLACK WINGS (it had to be published as an e-book, but we are waiting now, as very good publishers are asking to reconsider it)

A very original and amazing cross-over, astonishingly written, especially by a fifteen- years-old young girl.

Melissa is a very normal girl who lives her very normal life in the little town of Hardin (Montana). She runs her days with no illusions at all, among the school (which she hates), the airless and overwhelming shallowness of her schoolmates, her mom’s “dangerous” meals and Adam, her closest lifelong friend (and maybe he’s something more…).

Until the day when, tragically, something very bad happens and changes her life irreparably. Since then. everything is not going to be the same anymore: Adam seems to be a stranger, and seems to be hiding some mysterious secrets, and Melissa feels something very “dark” is about to come.

Will she able to find out what’s going on and save Adam from this wierd situation, before it’s too late? What’s the meaning of her recent scary nightmares? Balancing between folklore and new mysterious experiences, Mel will have to grow up very fast, choosing between love and a normal life, dramatically torn by these two apparently incompatible worlds. Meanwhile, a very threatening danger is slithering out from the shadows, and it might swallow both Mel’s normal life and love.

Even if, nowadays, monsters and legends seem to exist only in children books or in the ancient tales, Mel knows everything is never what seems to be.

Not only th plot is very good, but also che characters are very well portrayed and the way they evolve.

The novel got interest from more than one Important international Film Studios:

the whole novel is available in English.

(Also in English:

-a Reader’s Report

-a very well written Summary of the novel written in first person as if lokoking at events as they were in the past. The summary was requested by a film producer)

she is currently studying at the University of Berkley with a scholarship of of University’s exchange

Paola Dalmasso

Her previous books for children have been published by Piemme – Battello a Vapore: the very good selling www.mistericinesi.com

(www.chinesemisteries.com) and DELITTO AL CAMPO SCOUT –2008 (Murder at the Scout Camp). She has been a best selling author with her previous novels for children/YA

THE COACHMAN

He needed to be really careful. So he erased the computer and destroyed all possible traces.
“Months of work and money gone right up in smoke! Plus I’ll need a new handle. Pity, that. I liked the Piper. It was perfect. Just like in the fairy tale: saint and demon all rolled into one. The decider of the fate of little children. For better. Or worse”.
A child disappears without a trace from a junior high school in a well-to-do area of Milan. His name is Tommi. He is 11 years old and has spent his entire childhood in care. He has a bashful smile and the insecure air of a kid desperate for adult approval. His body is eventually discovered hidden under a pile of old rags in that same school. Betrayed by one of those adults whose approval he so craved. A predator right in their midst and already on the hunt for new victims in those same classrooms and on the web. An individual that swaps horrific images of those victims with his accomplice, the Apostle: “Now the kid stared out at him from the screen, wide-eyed. He wasn’t screaming anymore. Or crying. He was just waiting, broken at last. Obedient. Knowing now that there was just one person that could console him or torture him and who that was.”
The word “paedophilia” has probably never appeared in a young adult fiction novel before because of the horrific nature of the subject matter. Former high school teacher and mother of three, Paola Dalmasso, author of three other published YA mysteries (“Chinese Puzzles”
“Crime at Scout Camp”, “The Underworld Band”) decided it was time to break the silence. The result of that courageous decision is a story that, although completely the product of her imagination, is eerily reminiscent of actual events that shocked Italy, Britain, Belgium, the United States, Germany and France to the core. All nations in which paedophilia has reared its ugly head very publically. Areas of the world in which a sensitively-told story shorn of sensationalism will find a wide readership in novel form or a large audience if adapted for the big or small screen.

The author is well aware that while kids may not learn about these tragedies in books, they certainly do so from TV, the internet and their own friends. She also understands that staying silent about them, hiding them, is counterproductive. In fact, talking about them may actually help children defend themselves from other potential monsters.
And so Paola Dalmasso came to write this unique novel. It is her voice that drives the narrative. The story of Tommi’s death and his killer’s hunt for other victims is told from the perspective of children. It is handled frankly and unambiguously but in a way sensitive to readers of all ages.

The Piper, the Apostle and their accomplices are killers, pure and simple. The hunt for them is a relentless race against time by the various Italian police forces and their tracker dogs. But also flanking them in their investigation are three youngsters – Matteo, Giovanni and the flame-haired Valeria – as well as Miss Luci, a school-teacher that wins everyone’s heart.

This is breathtakingly fast-paced, filmic novel delivering one edge-of-the-seat scene after another and culminating in the triumph of good over evil.

The Coachman begins with one of the main characters looking back years after the event: “It had been 7 years, 20 months and 18 days exactly. At 6’ 3”, Giovanni Ravasio was a tall guy and yet his legs were shaking as he turned the corner. He hadn’t thought about it since. Not once. Suddenly, his legs turned to lead. He stared at the big familiar-looking wooden door. Could it really be the same one?”

Behind it, Giovanni and the others had spent morning after morning under the watchful gaze of the janitor Ambrogio with “his big head of white hair and enormous demonic green eyes”. They were all a little intimidated by him but he wasn’t the real threat, the real evil.
“Sometimes children are just like kid goats in a meadow, completely vulnerable, with nowhere to run. Then one day, the wolf comes by and picks off the weakest member of the flock,” the photographer murmured softly.

“Not always,” replied the teacher. “Sometimes it’s a shepherd not a wolf and they just follow him automatically. So he feeds them and becomes their protector…”
The arrival of evil turns children into adults. “There are cops and a social worker in the principal’s office,” Miss Luciana Sartori said, her voice cracking. “Tommi didn’t come home Saturday. He’s been gone over two days now. He just disappeared into thin air”.
The shrill screech of the school bell broke the silence but not one of the children moved. They just sat there, glued to their seats, their eyes fixed on the janitor.”
The Piper found his little rat. He made his kill. And he’ll do it again. But this time, he won’t escape. This time he’ll pay.

A long excerpt in English is already avaible.

LA BANDA DEL MONDO DI SOTTO/ MILOUD, published by EDT in 2011.

It’s a comic thriller about the a large community of poor young guys living in Bucarest. It’s a very topical issue, told by a new and amazing point of view, the street-guys living in the city tunnels’ point of view. The street-guys live the most of the daylight time hiding themselves in the tunnels excavated right down the streets of the city. Here the healing is free (thanks to the presence of pipes and sewers) and the tunnels connect the ex Ceausescu’s palace to the main points of the city. Many of these guys escaped from orphanages, where they had to bear every kind of cruelties. These guys live by stealing, keeping themselves hidden in the tunnels all the day long and coming out just at night, in the darkness. Every tunnel is controlled by its own boss and it’s got stable inhabitants, so that every new possible “guest” who wants to come and live there too has to be accepted by the clan. In this context, the philantropical clown Miloud seems to be the only chance of redemption for those guys: he tries to take them out from the tunnels and join his street circus, instead. Miloud will play a very important role in the plot, indeed. Page by page, the reader gets that which is the real danger in these guys’ life. They have to escape something more than the daylight and the cops: some ruthless men who are ready to every kind of cruel acts (such as murder) against them, just to go on with their illegal anad terrible affairs. One guy dies. Another one is admitted to hospital under mysterious circumstances. The boss starts being weird. A fire explodes in a tunnel. A man seems to know in advance which is the manhole the characters will come out from each time. Everyone suspects everyone else and the time to get what’s happening is running away fast. After a breathless escape along the tunnels, one of the main characters finds out to be in the ex Ceausescu’s Palace. Right there all things and people will reveal their real face and the truth surfaces. An amazing plot, which captures the reader till the end of the book.

Excerpts in English are available

Paola Dalmasso

Paola Dalmasso has written three novels for children. Recently, some movieproducers are expressing their interest in them. MILOUD (working title), has been published by EDT in 2011 (it is a teen-agers and YA’s novel).

MISTERIES IN CHINATOWN /MISTERI CINESI

(Piemme, Battello a Vapore)

An international thriller set in Milan’s Chinatown, with relationships also in

the Police Department of Santa Monica (California). Leo and Suyan are the

main characters. Leo is an Italian boy who’s living in Milan’s Chinatown and

attending the school near him, where Chinese students are the majority.

Suyan is his closest friend and she is Chinese. The two guys live most of

their daytime together: they walk to school together and do their schoolhomework

together, at Leo’s or at Suyan’s dad’s (Mr Yong) restaurant.

Their quiet life gets suddenly cracked as soon as the crimes start growing in

Yong’s closest partner in work. For this reason the two guys secretly start

following him. Till when Suyan’s cat is found dead with a threatening

message on its body. A few days later, during the Chinese New Year Eve

party at the Mr. Yong’s restaurant, Leo is offered wish-biscuits by Mr. Yong,

but someone has exchanged the New Year Eve greetings message hidden in

the biscuit with a threatening one. One more disquieting signal. And Liam

himself waited on…

Now, Leo and Suyan do definitively know someone is watching them.

But Leo has got a very special friend. He is Superintendent Walt, from Santa

Monica: Leo had contacted him through Internet some time earlier.

Superintendent Walt is very fond of Leo, since he has lost a same-age-son

some years before. As soon as Leo tells him what’s up, Superintendent Walt

seriously warns Leo about the situation: something very dangerous is

happening. Something concerning the racquet. Leo has to alert the Police

Dept. in Milan as soon as possible.

Superintendent Walt was right in warning Leo: in a short time, Leo and

Suyan are kidnapped on their way to school. A classmate sees everything.

And Superintendent Walt himself will be contacted by the Interpol…

It has been selling more than 5.000 copies.

Excerpts in English are available for both of the novels.

ADULT FICTION

Daniela Dawan

DON’T SAY YOU FORGET IN TIME (Marsilio Editore)

This novel alternates between two very different places and periods: Tunisia in 1938 and Milan in 2008. At its centre is Cesare Orvieto, a well-known doctor in Tunis’s Italian community.

In an attempt to reiterate his identity as both an Italian and a Jew in nation under French rule, Orvieto embraces the “seemingly liberal” principles of the Italian Fascist party. However, when the racial laws are introduced and black-shirts begin to roam even the streets of remote Tunis, Cesare realises the enormity of his mistake.

The tragic fate of Marise Esqueria, a Jewish Tunisian artist and dancer that espouses the cause of the Tunisian nationalists, provides a counterpoint to his story. She, like Cesare, becomes a victim of her desperate commitment to freedom and independence, albeit it in her case, for Tunisia itself.

Seventy years apart, these two stories are unearthed and interweave with the lives of 48 year old concert pianist Anna and her French partner, Philippe, a photographer.

On the eve of a major debut performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major at La Scala in Milan, Anna decides to join Philippe who has been invited to the presentation of a volume of popular songs of the day collected in Tunis in 1938 by his grandfather Alfred d’Espinger, a French government representative.

This short visit to Tunis restores Anna’s deep sense of her art and helps her discover that only love can make any choice genuine and unexpectedly reconnects Anna with a long-hidden part of her family’s history. In the bundle of documents and letters returned to Philippe, Anna finds an envelope address to her great-uncle, Cesare Orvieto. Inside is a photograph of a woman and child with the following inscription: “Your daughter on her first birthday. Even though I am sending this photograph a little late, I want to remember you on this date. The passing of time does not make you forget”.

The letter had been returned to the sender – Augusta Levi, care of Baron Alfred d’Espinger, Rue Jules Ferry 50 –because it arrived at Cesare Orvieto’s address too late for him to read it and realise that the woman that had played such a role in shaking his life to its core was living nearby with the baby daughter he had never met. Augusta levi was a concert pianist too. Two Concert pianist’ lives interweave in different periods.

Ideals, music and passion fill the pages of this novel which gives the reader a uniquely powerful and clear viewpoint of the characters as their stories unfold while the author gently drives home her point that all and any knots in the soul can be unravelled by a poetically determined refusal to not forget the past.

An excerpt in English is available.

The novel received a lot of press and it is available for all who are interested.

She is also the author of a gripping thriller (I am working to have foreign rights to submit)

She also writes scripts for films

Daniela Dawan was born in Tunis and she lived there during her childhood. She came to Italy with her family in 1967 because of the “six days’ war”. She has been living in Rome, in Brussels and the US. Now she lives and works as a lawyer in Milan.

German rights sold to Knaus (Bertelsman-Random House) who have published in September 2010.

The author has almost finished the sequel

The first volume of Hélène Visconti’s autobiography is a fascinating story, one that communicates the human warmth and extraordinary personality of its author. In this first-person narrative we see the world through the eyes of Hélène, a keenly perceptive and tenaciously independent young child forced to grow up quickly in a period of brutal social upheaval in which only her indomitable spirit can bring her through.

With a feisty determination well beyond her years, time and again she begins her life anew, constantly searching for a sense of “belonging” in a world bristling with class prejudice, revolutionary foment, dictatorial repression, fundamentalist ardour, the uncertainties of war and the privations of emigration, a world that imperils at every turn her need for a national identity and the right to her very existence.

Her story opens in Algeria in 1936, when as a four-year-old child, the first of five children, she begins to take on ever greater responsibilities to help her mother run the household.

The child’s first years of innocence and play are set against the dark clouds gathering over faraway Spain (her family’s homeland), Germany, France, and in the Algerian capital of Algiers.

The Second World War dramatically changes the rules of the game in Algeria for immigrant families like Hélène’s.

Victory Day, May 8th, brings joy for the end of the war but also shock, as news filters in of attacks and murders in the emerging struggle between Arab and French communities in the country. Hélène herself falls victim to these social upheavals when she is kidnapped by nationalist rebels and only escapes by sheer force of character and a precocious display of extraordinary bravery. This is the beginning of a fratricidal war carried out in the name of national liberation, with the ominous motto The Suitcase or the Coffin,that would change human relations in the country between all social groups and races. The suitcase meant emigration, and emigration meant abandoning a life constructed painstakingly with years of toil and sweat. It meant finding a new country that would accept the family.

Their exile begins in a refugee camp in Fedalà, Morocco. The young child has now become a young girl, helping the family to re-establish itself economically. But she warns her parents of a strange feeling she has that exile has not solved their problem: every hurtful thing they had suffered in Algeria would be repeated in their new country. Better to leave while there is still the chance. But her father refuses to leave: their future is there, he insists.

She makes the journey to Paris, alone, but France refuses to grant her French citizenship, forcing her into the life of an illegal immigrant until saved by a generous acquaintance who intervenes with the French State to get her the citizenship she had been promised since birth. The price she pays for this is abandoning her Spanish birthright: a hard blow, but one she absorbs stoically, and moves on. Then, one day, a friend at work extends an invitation to spend Christmas in Italy, at the home of her family in a small town in Emilia. Enamored of this new country, Hélène chooses it as her own, and for the first time since escaping from North Africa she feels truly welcomed. But that, of course, means learning a new language, and starting all over.

The narrative ends just at the point where she meets the man who will change her life yet again. But that is the starting point for the second volume of this autobiography.

This story has a pacing and a rhythm that keeps you turning the pages in amazement at the sheer force of will that drives the writer through the life situations she faces. It is writing of great suggestive depth, in which each word has weight and significance, in a style richly textured with nuances that evoke other lives, lived in other languages, a style that prints a special stamp on each word.

The writer is currently working on a story set in Spain, her ancestral home, the home she was forced to renounce to become the person she is today.

A full translation into English and French are available.

Gabriella Steindler Moscati

She was born in Israel. Her parents are Italian citizens. She grew-up balancing herself between these two cultures. She attended the “Oriental” University in Naples, Bar-llan University in Israel and she’s been Fulbright Scholar at the University of California in Berkeley. She’s currently teaching Jewish Literature and Language at the “Oriental” University in Naples.

Many essays of hers have been published in English, American and Jewish.

Gabor Dessau is an mining engineer . He is Jewish and after racial laws came out in Italy, suddenly, he finds himself awkwardly employed by an Italian company in Eritrea. This sounds like he’s Italian enough to work for Italy under the army’s supervision, but not Italian enough to be a soldier. Gabor, who works in a sort of Desert of the Tartars, is often confused by the contradictions of the army authorities’ orders he has to deal with. Also, the authorities don’t hesitate to leave him alone just in the most difficult circumstance.

As weird the situation is as remarkable is Gabor’s devotion to his duty, till the end.

Eventually, the capture: he’s not Italian enough to be a soldier, but he is quite enough Italian to be caught by the English army. He is moved from camp to camp, from Eritrea, to Egypt, to Palestine, and at last to India.

Once in India, even during the war, the English army’s officers release him on bail and let him work, as they are well impressed by his passion for his work, by his perfect English and they know he is a Jew, grotesquely captured by the English army. In Jaipur, the Maharajah has offered him a to work for him. Another incredible story starts.

He turns out to be not only very reliable and professional but also able to overcome any difficulties, in order to devote himself to mineralogy and work with Indian rich natural mineral resources.

At last, the prestigious Geology Survey of India directed by fine English experts, in Calcutta asks him to work with them and start a new section in the company. He is enthusiastic. The war is going to come to an end soon, but for Dessau a new wonderful voyage starts, in India. For the moment, he decides to stay and work in India. He will go to Italy to visit his parents when the war is over. He does not know who he will find at home…

In order to be able to work, he constructs his working instruments by transforming leftover war materials, gun carriages and other abandoned weapons or objects.

He is dedicated to his job and travels throughout India by train, by bus, on donkeys and by any means of transport available in order to reach the areas he has to go, even taking whole days if it is necessary. He sets up a team of young Indian mineralogy specialists who will learn a lot, almost everything, from him and will extremely respect and love him.

Joy for the end of the war in 1945 but also dangerous riots by Indian nationalists against English community and Western people. Often it is dangerous to go out and walk along the streets. But Dessau loves India, his job, the people he is working with, and also “finds” love in India.

It’s not a fiction plot. It’s a true story coming from the author’s researches among her family memories, diaries, letters and documents she has found into her grandparents’ house in Perugia. Her uncle wrote a daily diary and he noted all that which was happening and sent many letters home.

Indeed, a remarkable memoir.

Long excerpts in English are available.

Investigative journalism

Antonio Selvatici

An investigative journalist, interested in intelligence, after graduation he took a degree from Bocconi University in “Security and Protection Against Crime and Emergencies”, at the department Space Bocconi, the European Centre for studies on protection of Corporations.

He has then been appointed as a consultant in the firstItalian Commission Against Counterfeit (the first one in the World), an now he has been appointed again in the second Italian Commission Against Counterfeit researching counterfeit and piracy in the economic field, from an international point of view.

Before this essay he has published a courageous investigative book, studying hot documents in the Archives of the Secret Services of former communist countries.

As an investigative journalist, he has written for Milano Finanza andother newspapers and magazines and he is the author of other essays.

The New Silk Road is an ambitious infrastructural, commercial, military and strategic project designed to connect China with Europe.

When completed, it will form the most important commercial and strategic route between East and West.

The plan has two parts: one land-based and the other maritime which together form a belt of sorts.

Actually dubbed the “One Belt, One Road” project, it traverses 65 nations which, between them, account for 55 per cent of the planet’s GDP, 70 per cent of its population and 75 per cent of its energy reserves.

China has earmarked 1.4 trillion dollars in total to invest in the project over the coming decades and 40 billion dollars have already been raised.

The final destination of the sea route is Venice.

One of the objectives of project is, in fact, to acquire the ILVA Steel Works in Taranto.

Italy is heavily involved in the project but this not a widely known fact.

These are new commercial routes designed to move huge quantities of goods which is why China is putting pressure on Brussels to grant it Market Economy Status (MES).

The fact remains however that China has an assisted economy rather than a market one.

Antonio Selvatici is a journalist and lecturer on the Masters in Economic Intelligence course at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He also acts as a consultant to the current and previous legislature’s Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on Commercial Counterfeit, Piracy and Illegal Trading Phenomena. Antonio Selvatici also collaborates with various research institutes. His book The Black Book of Counterfeiting was published by Pendragon in 2012 and has run to two editions and a reprint. The Prato System was published by the same house in 2016.

Important International Producers are interested in his works

THE BLACK BOOK OF COUNTERFEIT/IL LIBRO NERO DELLA CONTRAFFAZIONE

(II Enlarged and More International Edition, January 2014)( I edition, 2012)

The first investigative journalistic book of economic intelligence on counterfeit.

The astonishing figures of counterfeit’s business, the strong connections with organized crime and the international interlacements.

Not only the well-known griffes of clothes, but also counterfeit weapons, food such as tomato’ sauce Made in China and sold as Made in Italy, counterfeit cigarettes sold under famous brands. Toys, spare parts for cars, agricultural products, visas: all fake.

Cybersecurity is also analized by the author on an international background: how is information “stolen” on the web?

Counterfeit is a theft which costs a few billions of Euros per year only in Italy: a remarkable slice of ‘Made in Italy’ products (also bought abroad as ‘’Made in Italy!) and customers are paying for it.

Counterfeit withdraws economic resources from the countries who do research in order to improve their productions and supplies the economy those who counterfeit the result of all this long and difficult process: an unfair and illegal transfer..

In particular, Chinese people have been specializing in production, distribution and selling of counterfeit products: a scourge that has to be torn apart as soon as possible.

An analysis and a list of the corporations who should take control of the phenomenon in Italy, in Europe and worldwide and a list of suggestions for possible alternative measures to bar a phenomenon which urgently needs to be opposed with the best efficacy.

It is a very strong and scientific-researched book, and at the same time it is written also for Customers as readers.

A long English excerpt is available.

The author has been invited to present the book in many cities and occasion, among which in Bruxellles, Strasboug by the European Parliament.

The book has received many articles from newspapers, press agencies, … (excerpts in English available)

Important International Producers are interested in his work

FROM THE ARCHIVES: HOW DID EASTERN EUROPE SECRET SERVICES SPY ON ITALIAN AFFAIRS? FROM THE RED BRIGADES TO STASI’S TRADING COMPANIES, RAF and KGB by Antonio Selvatici

The first edition (June 2009) has been sold out and on May 2010 a new edition has been published.

It is an enlarged edition (more than 100 pages in addition) with an insert of photos never published before the author has researched in the STASI’s archive in Berlin and in the Secret Services’ archive in Prague, and a more international point of view, with unexpected connections to the terrorist Carlos.

By making use of unpublished documents for the first time (the author has been doing researches in Eastern Europe’s archive for more thank 3 years to have these documents), Selvatici deals with an absorbing subject, the relationship between some Eastern Europe Secret Services, PLO and Italian terrorists of the Red Brigades, and between them and the Italian communist party, the largest communist party of the Western World.

The interesting conclusion the author comes up to is that many embarrassing secrets of the West can be found in documents lying on the shelves of the archives of the Secret Services of the former Communist Countries of Europe.

The documents “speak” and they tell a part of embarrassing and never researched history of Europe.

This new edition reveals extraordinary international connections among terrorists during those years.

Connections between the international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Carlos, and the Red Brigades are revealed. Moreover, the reconstruction of the likely base of Carlos in Italy.

Also, the author has interviewed people whose names showed up in the unpublished documents coming from the Archives in Berlin and in Prague. His interviews let the author reconstruct events never revealed before.

Stasi’s spy ring had instituted trading companies in some countries of Western Europe, in order to obtain valuable currency and in order to let their trading employees (who were also spies sometimes) in. How did these trading companies actually work? The book tells the story of one of such companies, which was based in Italy.

A whole chapter is devoted to Italian politicians and journalists who have been passing secret documents and information to Prague (and to the whole Communist block, according to an agreement they had also with Cuba and Vietnam) for many years. The author has found the documents reporting the code names for each informer he writes about, and the code messages and documents they were delivering. A very serious essay which definitely reads like a spy story.

A disquieting picture comes out of these pages: dangerous relations which reveal an “International of Terrorism” which implicates governments and parties and on the background always the U.R.S.S.

Publishers and both film and television producers from different countries have been showing interest in it.

Even more newspapers and media are reviewing the second edition, while also the first edition had many important reviews.

The book has become a “classical” and it is still available and sold in bookstores!